172 stories by "JOHN SIMON"
A slow reader myself, I have always envied speedreaders. Come to think of it, are speedreaders and speedreading single words, or should they be two each? Note that a single word confers stat…
First, some errata from the last time round. The film director who bought flowers for my date was Francesco, not Franco, Rosi. (There was another film director, Franco Rossi, causing confusi…
I note now, with mild surprise, that in Part One all my famous people were part-time or full-time poets. Here now are others of a different sort. Take. for example, that fine actor and genui…
Having been during my long life a teacher of Humanities and critic of most of the arts, it would be a reasonable assumption that as their reviewer, as well as an occasionally published poet,…
I have mentioned some of the Linky story before, but here follows the final, complete, definitive account. With it told, I can put the whole matter behind me and move on.As I was reading for…
Names matter. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but if it were called buzzfunk we might think twice before sticking our nose into it, and all that sweetness would go to waste. I d…
One of the worst things a person can be is stupid. Stupidity is one of the greatest conceivable evils. Yet it isn't a sin at all. It is something no-one, with the exception of novelist…
Repeatedly I have written and spoken about exhaustion in the arts. Think how easy it was for the possibly pseudonymous Longus to write the immortal pastoral romance Daphnis and Chloe in the …
Students have become arrogant of late. I noticed that during my last years of professorship, and I find it confirmed by what I hear and read these days. When I say that in my days we were no…
A good many people are content to be part of the ordinary multitude. A good many others are not thus content. There is the not infrequent desire to be special, outstanding, even unique. This…
Concreteness, compactness, concision--put it any way you like--is something that good writing is based on. Or you may call it, as Jacques Barzun did in the title and content of an important …
What is religion really about, and do we truly need it? An atheist wonders and asks these fundamental questions.Obviously, a thinking person has to wonder why the universe exists, and, conco…
I admire champions of lost causes: the beautiful losers, to borrow the title of an early Leonard Cohen opus, by far his best. The Japanese, apparently, have great respect for them; the Japan…
Will we ever be able to communicate with our friends"hold that"our kinfolk, the animals? It seems highly unlikely, but that does not mean that they don't have some sort of language among the…
What could be more pointless at this late date than protesting against abstract art? As soon complain about the ballpoint for dislodging the fine fountain pen. Not, by the way, that earlier …
There are in my view both real sequels and quasi sequels. A real sequel is when the author of a book, say, Margaret Mitchell, or someone else writes a novel about what happened to Scarlett O…
If we are going to deal with epigrams, we must first distinguish between wit and humor. Humor makes you laugh, as with every good joke that someone tells you. Like the loony in the bin telli…
One of the great gifts of mankind is our memory. Without it, we could be greatly impoverished, though, as gifts go, it is a double-edged sword: a donor as well as a tormentor"sometimes a pot…
When Irwin Edman of Columbia University's Philosophy Department was guest professor at Harvard, I took his course in aesthetics. What I still remember from it is his quoting William Ja…
It is unquestionably a good thing that prizes in the arts exist. By and large, artists of all types are underpaid"if paid at all!"and monetary awards help them create or, in many cases, even…
I recall a conversation with a minor conductor. MC: Do you like Bach? JS: Not at all. MC: How about Mozart? JS: Ditto. MC: Beethoven? JS: Hardly. MC (exasperated): Do you like music? JS: Abs…
When my father lay dying in a Florida hospital, he asked me whether there was God and an afterlife. I was in a quandary. If I said yes, I would have betrayed my sworn conviction. (Perhaps I …
We need games. We know what all work and no play does to Johnny, and who wants to be a dull boy? The popularity of sports is, of course, the prime example of the role of games in our everyda…
We need games. We know what all work and no play does to Johnny, and who wants to be a dull boy? The popularity of sports is, of course, the prime example of the role of games in our everyda…
Memoirs make a wonderful read. You don't have to be famous or even outrageous to produce a fascinating book of recollections. Even the humblest persons may have had enough of a roller coaste…
